Jake Barrow

A tough, no-nonsense private eye from New york City, JAKE BARROW slugged his way through six Gold Medal paperback originals in the late fifties/early sixties.

Nick Quarry was actually a pseudonym for writer Marvin Albert, who wrote for newspapers, magazines, television and film. The buzz on the Barrow books is that they represent author Albert's very best work. He created other P.I. characters, including French Riviera gumshoe Pete Sawyer, boatnik P.I. Tony Rome (later turned into two cheesy Sinatra flicks) and retro eye Harp under such pen names as J. D. Christilian and even Anthony (Anthony!) Rome.

And the line between character and creator got even further blurred. In 1968 there was a short pilot for an unsold series, Nick Quarry (1968). It was essentially an action-orientated extended trailer, with music by Jerry Goldsmith, no less, made to plug a show based on the Frank Sinatra flick, Tony Rome, from the previous year. Supposedly selling the show was a hard gig, because of its violence.

In the early 1980's, Albert moved to France, where he was widely admired, and lived there until his death in 1996. After his death, Requiem pour un muckraker, a collection of short stories by French crime writers was published, as a literary "hommage" to Albert. There was also a short story by Albert himself, and a postscript by Patrick Raynal, currently the director of the Serie Noire, where most of Albert's crime novels were published in France.